Trump Jr. appears to contradict father’s claim he never told Comey he hoped FBI director would end Flynn probe

Donald Trump Jr. appears to have contradicted his father’s account of a conversation between the president and former FBI Director James Comey about the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn while seeming to confirm Comey’s version.

“I think it’s clear that everything that went on in the Comey testimony was basically ridiculous,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro on Saturday night. “You and I both know my father a long time. When he tells you to do something, guess what, there’s no ambiguity in it. There’s no, ‘Hey, I’m hoping.’ You and I are friends, ‘Hey, hope this happens but you get to do your job.’ That’s what he told Comey.”

“I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible,” Trump tweeted. “Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!’”

Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and friend and confidant of Comey’s, told Yahoo News on Friday afternoon that the proper response to any suggestion the former FBI director broke the law by leaking a personal memo to the press was “laughter.”

“First of all, Comey was very clear that the memo that he wrote was intentionally written in unclassified form so that it would not be bound up in classification rules,” Wittes said. “So if the claim is that he’s admitted to leaking classified information, that’s simply factually false.”